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The Life of Bach The life of Bach Peter Williams published by the press syndicate of the university of cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom cambridge university press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge, cb22ru,UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, ny 10011–4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcon´ 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org C Peter Williams 2004 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2004 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge Typeface FF Quadraat 9.75/14 pt. System LATEX2ε [tb] A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Williams, Peter F. The life of Bach / Peter Williams. p. cm. – (Musical lives) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–521–82636–5 1. Bach, Johann Sebastian, 1685–1750. 2. Composers – Germany – Biography. I. Title. II. Series. ml410.b1w71 2003 780.92–dc21 2003055080 [b] isbn 0 521 82636 5 hardback isbn 0 521 53374 0 paperback contents List of illustrations vi Acknowledgments viii Introduction 1 1 Early years, 1685–1703 5 2 First appointments, 1703–1708 25 3 Weimar, 1708–1717 45 4Cothen,¨ 1717–1723 76 5 Leipzig, the first decade 99 6 Leipzig, the second decade 125 7 Leipzig, the final years, and the first personal descriptions 137 Appendix 1: a sample hypothesis 196 Appendix 2: some terms 203 List of references 206 BWV index 209 Index of names 212 v illustrations 1 Map of northern Germany in the time of J. S. Bach. 4 2 Map of Thuringia and Saxony in the time of J. S. Bach. 8 3 First reference in print to J. S. Bach. From Johannes Mattheson, Das besch¨utzte Orchestre (Hamburg, 1717), p. 222. 69 4 Clavier-B¨uchlein vor Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, Allemande BWV 836. Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University, Music Deposit 31, fols. 7v–8r. 86–7 5 Cantata performance in a west-end gallery. An engraving of the performance at the opening of Gottfried Silbermann’s new three-manual organ in Freiberg cathedral, 1714. Stadt- und Bergbaumuseum, Freiberg, Saxony. 100 6 Leipzig, church and school (left) of St Thomas. An engraving by J. G. Schreiber c1735, ultimately based on J. G. Krugner’s¨ engraving of 1723 and showing the school building as it was before it was enlarged to eight floors (counting attics) in 1732. 108 7 Praeludium of harpsichord partita No. 1 The first page of music in score that J. S. Bach published: Clavier Ubung, Partita 1, Published by the Author, Leipzig, 1726. 112 8 Gebhardt sword. A sword in the possession of the Sharfrichterfamilie, or executioner’s family, the Gebhardts, from 1721, and now on display in the Stadtgeschichtliches Museum, Altes Rathaus, Leipzig. 119 9 Dresden, view downstream from right bank, by Bernardo Bellotto (‘Canaletto’), c1750. vi List of illustrations vii Reproduced by permission of the National Gallery of Ireland. 126 10 Organ keyboards. The console layout of a major two-manual organ of Saxony in the 1730s (St Peter’s, Freiberg, organ by Gottfried Silbermann, c1733). 130 11 Portrait of J. S. Bach. A copy from 1748 by the painter E. G. Haussmann of his original portrait of 1746. Collection of William H. Scheide, Princeton, NJ. 153 12 Bust of J. S. Bach. Made by Karl Seffner in 1895, based on a hypothetical reconstruction of the feaures of a skull exhumed in the churchyard of the Johanniskirche in 1894 and claimed to be that of the composer in Wilhelm His, Johann Sebastian Bach: Forschungen ¨uber dessen Grabst¨atte, Leipzig, 1895. 194 1 Early years, 1685–1703 Johann Sebastian Bach belongs [sic] to a family in all of whose members equally a love for and skill in music seem, as a common gift, to have been imparted by nature. The Obituary’s chief author, C. P. E. Bach (Emanuel), was well aware of the musical part of his family’s history as it had been handed down, for although his father seems to have contributed little if anything to the day’s published biographies, he spent time compiling a genea- logical table, the ‘Origin of the musical-Bach family’ (‘Ursprung der musicalisch-Bachischen Familie’, Dok I, pp. 255–67). He did this at or around the age of fifty, and Emanuel added to it. It numbers fifty- three Bachs over some two hundred years, many of them professional musicians well known in central Germany, though only one or two be- came so in a larger Europe – himself and, as perhaps he could anticipate by 1735, some of his sons. One can imagine the personal reasons why a composer would com- pile such a table at or near his half century, especially after suffering so many bereavements from early childhood on: his parents (mother at fifty, father two days short of fifty), gradually all seven of his siblings (he was the youngest), a wife, no fewer than ten children and a beloved employer. The wider the extended Bach family in Thuringia, the more constantly news of deaths circulated. In addition, J. S. Bach might have 5 6 The life of Bach been open as much to the day’s fashions as to any atavistic compul- sions of his own. For genealogies were well known in the book centre of Leipzig, where, throughout the 1720s and 1730s, Johann Hubner¨ was publishing aristocratic and other family tables for what was evidently a ready market. One such book had some 333 tables. In its pride at the size and musical achievements of the large clan to which he, a child-orphan, belonged, Bach’s table is doing two things: establishing the story of an exceptional family and saluting an art prac- tised to the greater glory of God. The story is not a fairy tale but sets out an (as it were) apostolic succession, not entirely unlike the genealogical tables in two Gospels and parts of the Pentateuch, consciously or other- wise. Chiefly as a result of it, the Bachs have become the best-known musical family, though positions of higher prestige were occupied by some of the Couperin family in Paris. The first name in the table, Veit Bach, was that of a man said to have fled Hungary for his Lutheran faith, and although this is doubtful – Hungary (meaning modern Slovakia?) had early on become predominantly Protestant – from Veit a Tree of Jesse springs, a genealogy of Protestant church musicians active over generations. Probably a few years later, the table was joined by another family document, the Old-Bach Archive, a collection of choral works by older family members, inluding Sebastian’s father and first father-in-law. The collection seems to have passed to J. S. Bach on the death (and perhaps by particular request) of his first cousin Johann Ernst in 1739, an organist who like Sebastian had studied in Hamburg, and who suc- ceeded him at Arnstadt in 1708. Both the Archive and the main copy of the table passed later to Emanuel Bach. By the 1730s, music as an honourable family trade reflected the growingrespectforartandtheartist,‘Kunst,derKunstler’:thiswasnot¨ a dynasty of shoemakers. A surgeon and a shopkeeper who qualified for listing among the table’s ‘musical Bachs’ were, one can assume, gifted amateurs, unlike the Bach who had been a court jester but is not included, despite Sebastian’s certain knowledge of him (Geiringer 1954, p. 9). Of course, the list also excludes the mothers, wives and Early years, 1685–1703 7 daughters. In a letter of 1748, Bach informs a cousin of Emanuel’s ‘two male heirs’ without mentioning their sister, for it was the boys through whom the family tree grew further. Yet his own mother, a L¨ammerhirt, wasundoubtedlymusical,beingamemberofafamilycloselyconnected with music in Erfurt, the region’s largest city. She was related to other significant musicians, composers to whose music J. S. Bach was to respond in one way or another: J. G. Walther (as stepsister to his great- aunt) and J. H. Buttstedt (as second cousin to his wife). (See below for remarks on Bach’s engagement with the music of ‘minor composers’.) Something surely came to Sebastian from his mother, as it came to his sons from their mothers, both of whose original families were also musical. It would be something to wonder at that such fine men should be so little known outside their fatherland, if one did not consider that these honourable Thuringians were so content with their fatherland and their status that they would not venture far from it, even to go after their fortune. Sons of Bach would assume that normally success could only be meas- ured by going away to study or by occupying a position of prestige away from home, in a royal court of renown, such as Emanuel’s in Potsdam at the time of the Obituary. For some decades the garrulous Hamburg critic Johann Mattheson had been lionising Handel and reporting on his successes in England, and news of Handel’s great if fluctuating wealth had reached his native city of Halle nearby. Bach’s successor at Leipzig, Gottlob Harrer, had ‘spent some time in Italy’ (Dok II, p. 480), as Emanuel, who also applied for the job, admitted he had not (Dok III, p. 255). Telemann, Emanuel’s godfather, had travelled, come into contact with Polish music, written operas for the free city of Hamburg, visited Paris and actually declined the Leipzig cantorate: a varied and productive musical life of fame and patent success.
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